hort, the signs of a breach between classes, and the
precursors of the ever inflammable feud between the rich and the poor,
meditated nothing less than a great Political Sermon--a sermon that
should extract from the roots of social truths a healing virtue for the
wound that lay sore, but latent, in the breast of his parish of
Hazeldean:

And thus ran--

_The Political Sermon of Parson Dale._

CHAPTER XII.

"For every man shall bear his own burden."

_Galatians_, c. vi., v. 5.

"Brethren, every man has his burden. If God designed our lives to end at
the grave, may we not believe that he would have freed an existence so
brief from the cares and sorrows to which, since the beginning of the
world, mankind has been subjected? Suppose that I am a kind father, and
have a child whom I dearly love, but I know by a divine revelation that
he will die at the age of eight years, surely I should not vex his
infancy by needless preparations for the duties of life. If I am a rich
man, I should not send him from the caresses of his mother to the stern
discipline of school. If I am a poor man, I should not take him with me
to hedge and dig, to scorch in the sun, to freeze in the winter's cold:
why inflict hardships on his childhood, for the purpose of fitting him
for manhood, when I know that he is doomed not to grow into man? But if,
on the other hand, I believe my child is reserved for a more durable
existence, then should I not, out of the very love I bear to him,
prepare his childhood for the struggle of life, according to that
station in which he is born, giving many a toil, many a pain to the
infant, in order to rear and strengthen him for his duties as man? So is
it with our Father that is in heaven. Viewing this life as our infancy,
and the next as our spiritual maturity, where, 'in the ages to come, he
may show the exceeding riches of his grace,' it is in his tenderness, as
in his wisdom, to permit the toil and the pain which, in tasking the
powers and developing the virtues of the soul, prepare it for the
earnest of our inheritance, the 'redemption of the purchased
possession.' Hence it is that every man has his burden. Brethren, if you
believe that God is good, yea, but as tender as a human father, you will
know that your troubles in life are a proof that you are reared for an
eternity. But each man thinks his own burden the hardest to bear: the
poor man groans under his poverty, the rich man under the cares